This short film by Osamu Tezuka tells a story of an imaginative little boy, who believes that a fish he catches is in fact a mermaid. Unfortunately for the boy, the story takes place in a land where imagination is prohibited, and those who don't comply are heavily persecuted. The boy is tortured and brainwashed to the point where he begins to doubt his initial conviction about the fish being a mermaid. At the end however, when the boy goes to release this 'fish' back into the ocean, we see it swimming away as a mermaid.
This leaves us to believe that the fish was indeed a mermaid, and the boy was right all along. I believe this short film is trying to tell us of the power and significance of our imagination.
